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Google Phone App Might Get Caller ID Announcement Feature & More

Google Phone App Might Get Caller ID Announcement Feature & More

By Teja Chedalla
September 30, 2020

The Google Phone app has long been exclusive to Pixel and Android One smartphones. Last month, the app was made available to download on all Android smartphones through the Play Store. Now, the APK teardown of the latest version of the Google Phone app revealed a few new upcoming features. First and foremost, the Google Phone app will come with a Caller ID announcement feature.

As the name suggests, it will announce the caller’s name or number during an incoming call. While several Android OEMs already implemented this feature, it will now become a built-in feature of the Phone app.

Google might bring Caller ID announcement feature to its Phone app

There is also a newly added shortcut on the bottom of the screen for quickly accessing the saved voicemails. The next feature revealed in the teardown is a new option for the Call Screen feature. Users can now enable this option to automatically delete Call Screen transcripts and audio recordings that are older than 30 days.

Since Call Screen is only available in the US and Canada, this is irrelevant for Android users in other markets. All three new features are yet to come to the public or the beta version of the Google Phone app. Google might officially introduce these features with the upcoming Pixel 4A 5G and Pixel 5 smartphones.

Both these new Pixel smartphones, along with the Nest Audio smart speaker and Chromecast with Google TV, will be unveiled later today during the “Launch Night In” event. Even with the previously launched Pixel smartphones, Google made the newly announced software features exclusive to the Pixel lineup for a limited time.

All Android users can set Google Phone as the default dialer on their smartphones

Despite that, many of the features spotted in the APK teardowns never made it to the public release. Google’s replacements of the OEM’s dialer and messaging apps offer a clutter-free experience. OnePlus is the latest OEM to ditch its own apps in favor of Google apps.

The newly launched OnePlus Nord came with the Google Phone app instead of OnePlus’ dialer app. Moreover, the Google Phone app listed on the Play Store will now work with all the Android smartphones.

As reported by several users on the internet, there are some compatibility issues for using the Google Phone app on some smartphones. Google should be coming up with fixes to resolve all these issues. Furthermore, the OEM’s might also provide the Google Phone app as the default dialer app with their upcoming smartphones.